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Showing posts from August, 2012

IDX 8 – Solutions for industrial data problems

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Our company, Industrial Data Xchange, shares its name with our software suite, IDX. IDX first came into being in 1995 as an industrial data communications suite at a time when there were few options when interconnecting real-time data systems between vendors. The original IDX concept is fairly straightforward – it provides a pool of tags (or Slots) to which various modules, akin to plugins, can commonly read and write real-time data using Actions. The trick is that the modules implement the custom code to interface with a specified system but also know how to share data into the IDX tag pool. Therefore, as long as one has the modules developed for the system one wants to share data between, IDX becomes a common real-time data hub. Over time, many PLC, DCS and protocol-specific modules were developed, but for us, the most frequently used are OPC DA, IDX TCP (our proprietary TCP protocol), @aGlance, Gensym G2 and MODBUS, in the various flavours. Today, IDX 7 is largely still based